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time management

Minuting customer meetings

Jan 26th, 2010
by mark.
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The great Sir Winston Churchill once said “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it”. He was true to his word, writing “The Second World War”, “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples” and winning the Nobel prize for literature in the process (as you do).
[photo]
Likewise for us the importance of getting your version of a meeting circulated first is not to be underestimated. In fact I heard a story a while back about an ex-colleague who visited a very major account, had an OK meeting and went off on his way. A month or so later his boss wanted to visit this very major account with him and asked our friend to arrange it. So he picks up the phone calls them and asks for the meeting… to which they respond “no… we haven’t seen the action list from the last meeting yet”. Ouch.
As we’ve documented on Real Life Selling previously, sales people are notoriously shy of paperwork. However this is one case where you really have to grit your teeth and bash those minutes out.
If you don’t get your minutes out pretty quickly there are two risks…
* The momentum of the sale is lost. You’ve had a great meeting, got some commitment, but in two weeks time both you and they have moved on to the next urgent item.
* The customer minutes the meeting. “Great” you may think, “that’s saved me the effort”. But, of course, in their version of the minutes the commitments they made may be just a little softer than they seemed at the time and the items you committed to have been “bigged up”.
Here are some suggestions on minuting that I hope you’ll find useful…
Minute meetings as soon after they finish as possible. If it’s at your office, stay on in the meeting room for 15 minutes to write-up the meeting. If it’s at a customer’s site, sit in your car outside and write it up on your laptop before you leave, or at the airport, or on the plane home.
Concentrate on the next actions and use W3… who, what, when.
Start your follow-up actions immediately. You may not be able to finish them, but at least initiate them. So if you need a quotation… fill in the form and submit it. If you need someone to do something, email or call them and tell them what needs doing and by when.
Use your diary or electronic calendar to set some follow-up reminders.
Thank the customer for their time and hospitality.
And finally keep the minutes to-the-point and business-like. As Sir Winston once said “This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read”.

The great Sir Winston Churchill once said “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it”. He was true to his word, writing “The Second World War”, “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples” and winning the Nobel prize for literature in the process (as you do).

About to get his version in first!

About to get his version in first!

Likewise for us mere mortals the importance of getting your version of a meeting circulated first is not to be underestimated. In fact I heard a story a while back about an ex-colleague who visited a very major account, had an OK meeting and went off on his way. A month or so later his boss wanted to visit this very major account with him and asked our friend to arrange it. So he picks up the phone calls them and asks for the meeting… to which they respond “no… we haven’t seen the action list from the last meeting yet”. Ouch.

As we’ve documented on Real Life Selling previously, sales people are notoriously shy of paperwork. However this is one case where you really have to grit your teeth and bash those minutes out.

If you don’t get your minutes out pretty quickly there are two risks…

* The momentum of the sale is lost. You’ve had a great meeting, got some commitment, but in two weeks time both you and they have moved on to the next urgent item.

* The customer minutes the meeting. “Great” you may think, “that’s saved me the effort”. But, of course, in their version of the minutes the commitments they made may be just a little softer than they seemed at the time and the items you committed to have been “bigged up”.

Here are some suggestions on minuting that I hope you’ll find useful…

  1. Minute meetings as soon after they finish as possible. If it’s at your office, stay on in the meeting room for 15 minutes to write-up it up. If it’s at a customer’s site, sit in your car outside and use your laptop before you leave, or at the airport, or on the plane home.
  2. Concentrate on the next actions and use W3… who, what, when.
  3. Start your follow-up actions immediately. You may not be able to finish them, but at least initiate them. So if you need a quotation… fill in the form and submit it. If you need someone to do something, email or call them and tell them what needs doing and by when.
  4. Use your diary or electronic calendar to set some follow-up reminders.
  5. Thank the customer for their time and hospitality.
  6. And finally keep the minutes to-the-point and business-like. As Sir Winston said “This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read”.

Five tips help you set your 2010 sales goals

Dec 29th, 2009
by mark.
1 comment
Achieving 2010 sales goals

Achieving 2010 sales goals

It’s now late December and either you are on vacation or in the office catching up on your paperwork. Most customers are doing the same, so now is an excellent time to sit down and set your goals for the coming year. Here are some goal setting tips for you…

  1. Top Down. If you have objectives set by your management they should, of course, be in there. If you have larger personal or life goals they should also feed into your 2010 sales goals.
  2. SMART. Make your goals SMART ones…

    3. S = Specific. What, why, and how?
    M = Measurable. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it!
    A = Attainable. You probably won’t really commit to a goal that’s out of reach. Too easy and you won’t get that sense of achievement when you get there.
    R = Realistic. Is it something that is under your control? If not it’s a hope not a goal.
    T = Timely. Set a timeframe. Include milestones along the way… don’t just set a year-end goal.

  3. Make your goals tangible. What will it feel like to achieve those goals? Imagine what you will buy with the commission, what will you do on your President’s Club trip, how will it feel when you get presented with the Sales Person of the Year award at the next annual sales meeting? Use all of your senses here… imagine what that champagne will taste like!
  4. Include professional goals as well as sales targets. What job do you want to be doing this time next year? Do you want to move to another company? Do you want to set up on your own as a rep? What new skills do you want to attain in the next year?
  5. Learn from your mistakes. Take the opportunity to look back on 2009. What did you do well, what could you have improved upon and how? What will you do differently this year?
  6. Reward yourself along the way. Regardless of what your company’s reward policy might be, give yourself some treats along the way for goals/milestones achieved.
  7. Keep the number of goals manageable. Nobody was ever one-sixteenth committed to anything. Better to have two really crunchy, very specific, achievable goals than sixteen flaky goals including how often you should back-up your PC.

The observant amongst you will notice that I promised to give you five tips and actually gave you seven… now that’s what I call value! More on exceeding the customer’s expectations in 2010.

Happy New Year and good selling in 2010!

Analysis Paralysis – Part II

Dec 18th, 2009
by mark.
No comments yet
Analysis Paralysis

Analysis Paralysis

You’ll remember that in Analysis Paralysis – Part I we talked about what happens when paperwork, reports and forecasts get out of hand. The process can be quite insidious with the request sneaking up on you disguised as “an information request” or a “quick summary”. We also gave some ideas on what sales managers can do to keep this under control.

Here are some more ideas for sales teams and sales managers on how to keep the reporting overhead to a minimum.

  • Try and get into a forecasting/reporting rhythm.
  • This should be “written in stone” so everyone knows what information is needed and when. They can their plan their sales activities around it.
  • If you batch your reporting, you minimise the time taken and the distraction. Otherwise you will have to continually stop and spend time to dig out the information you need, set up the spreadsheets, etc.
  • When a request comes in for a new, regular report or forecast push back a bit.
  • Often new Sales VPs don’t feel certain enough of their position to protect their teams time and will go along with almost any request from finance, marketing, ops…
  • How often will it be needed? Press for monthly rather than weekly, quarterly rather than monthly.
  • DON’T WHINGE. But sell your boss on why it’s not such a good idea, remind her of the opportunity cost and suggest an alternative.
  • Keep your records and those of your team up-to-date on an ongoing basis. If you do so then a lot of the information can be easily or automatically extracted from, for instance, your CRM system.

Finally remember, to run any business you need to know what’s happening, so reporting of some sort is inevitable. When you have to do that forecast don’t procrastinate, get on with it, do a good job, get it over with and get back you your selling.

Analysis Paralysis – Part I

Dec 11th, 2009
by mark.
No comments yet
Analysis Paralysis

Analysis Paralysis

We’ve all been there haven’t we? The boss has to present at the board meeting and needs a special report from his managers so that he’s got something to fill his 10 minute slot. This ususally is requested with the minimum of notice, despite that fact that the board meeting has been scheduled for months. Just to add insult to injury all of the information is in the weekly reports that the team submit but he can’t be arsed to go through them, so he needs it spoon-fed to him, custom sliced & diced.
Here’s another all too common scenario. A new regular report is required. It may be that you provide monthly revenue numbers and now in the economic downturn the management team is nervous so we must have weekly revenue numbers. I’ve never met a sales person worth her salt who enjoyed doing paperwork and so this kind of request is normally met with a barrage of complaint… and what is the response?
“This should only take a few minutes…”
“You can do it at the end of the day/at the weekend/waiting at the airport  [insert your own here].”
“A good sales person should have this info at her fingertips.”
Now this is all well and good, but there is an unavoidable fact… we all only have 168 hours per week… that’s you, me and even Warren Buffett. We can’t change that, so when we have to add a new activity to our schedule there is what we call an “opportunity cost” involved, that is the value of the activity that we have to fore go to do the new one. So for instance a new monthly report that takes a couple of hours to compile will cost a sales person 1.25% of her time. Make that a weekly report and that’s 5% of her selling time eaten into. And in sales, more so than any other profession, time is money.
Times may be hard, but if we’re not careful we may end up in a “death spiral”. Management are nervous so ask for more reports, in more detail on what’s happening out there. Sales people spend more time doing this and hence less time selling. Business gets worse, this has to be analysed in even more detail… you get the picture.
So, if you’re a sales manager, what can you do about this? Here are some questions to ask yourself before spamming out that new forecast or report to your team:
Do I really need this information, or is this simply a brain-fart?
Do I have the information already? Maybe an admin can take existing data and rework it for the report I need.
What is the opportunity cost of requesting this report?
If I do need it, what can I do to make it as quick and easy as possible for the sales team to complete?
Do I need this report/forecast forever? You should review the reporting procedures for the sales team regularly to make sure they aren’t spiralling out of control.
[to be continued]

We’ve all been there haven’t we? The boss has to present at the board meeting and needs a special report from his managers so that he’s got something to fill his 10 minute slot. This usually is requested with the minimum of notice, despite that fact that the board meeting has been scheduled for months. Just to add insult to injury all of the information is in the weekly reports that the team diligently submit but he can’t be arsed to go through them, thus he needs it spoon-fed to him, custom sliced & diced.

Here’s another all too common scenario. A new regular report is required. It may be that you provide monthly revenue numbers and now in the economic downturn the management team is nervous, so we must have weekly revenue numbers. I’ve never met a sales person worth her salt who enjoyed doing paperwork and so this kind of request is normally met with a barrage of complaint… and what is the response?

  • “This should only take a few minutes…”
  • “You can do it at the end of the day/at the weekend/waiting at the airport  [insert your own here].”
  • “But, a good sales person should have this information at her fingertips.”

Now this is all well and good, but there is an unavoidable fact… we all only have 168 hours per week… that’s you, me and even Warren Buffett. We can’t change that, so when we have to add a new activity to our schedule there is what we call an “opportunity cost” involved, that is the value of the activity that we have to fore go to do the new one. So for instance a new monthly report that takes a couple of hours to compile will cost a sales person 1.25% of her time. Make that a weekly report and that’s 5% of her selling time eaten into. And in sales, more so than any other profession, time is money.

Times may be hard, but if we’re not careful we may end up in a “death spiral”. Management are nervous so ask for more reports, in more detail on what’s happening out there. Sales people spend more time doing this and hence less time selling. Business gets worse, this has to be analysed in even more detail… you get the picture.

So, if you’re a sales manager, what can you do about this? Here are some questions to ask yourself before spamming out that new forecast or report to your team:

  • Do I really need this information, or is this simply a brain-fart?
  • Do I have the information already? Maybe an admin can take existing data and rework it for the report I need.
  • What is the opportunity cost of requesting this report?
  • If I do need it, what can I do to make it as quick and easy as possible for the sales team to respond?
  • Do I need this report/forecast forever? You should review the reporting procedures for the sales team regularly to make sure they aren’t spiralling out of control.

[to be continued]